When I was a young (much younger) writer tackling my first story with pencil and paper, I believed that I was embarking on a lonely career where I would lock myself away for months while I exercised my genius to emerge with a novel ready for publication. Accolades and creativity would be enough to drive me.
Surprise, surprise, my authoring life didn’t go as planned. Not even close.
Fast-forward many years later to me in college where I’m still doggedly pursuing a creative writing degree because I am too stubborn to consider changing course and too in love with the craft to give it up.
It was in the classroom setting that I realized how monumentally important having other people cheering me on was to my writing process. Having a set deadline to turn in my work for class was also helpful in motivating me to complete projects.
Now that the long intro is over, I want to share what I’ve chosen for the last installment of the Writer’s Toolbox.
If you’re a writer or know a writer, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). When I first heard of it, I thought it was an unofficially designated writing month that authors around the world had somehow unanimously decided to adopt. Turns out, NaNoWriMo is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that challenges authors to write 50,000 words during the month of November. NaNoWriMo does work year-round as well with writing camps during the summer, youth programs and curriculum, and prep courses in October.
Signing up for NaNoWriMo is super easy, and it’s free. Many of the sponsors of NaNoWriMo like Scrivener, Novlr, Dabble, and IngramSpark®, and a ton of others offer coupons to participants and even bigger discounts to winners.
What I’ve enjoyed most about NaNoWriMo are the resources and support offered through the organization. There are weekly encouraging pep talks from successful authors, forums and endless choices in writing groups, as well as the ability to team up with “buddies” who can be personal cheerleaders. This is a phenomenal tool that gets my writing farther than it normally would be every year. Started in 1999 and officially becoming a nonprofit in 2006, NaNoWriMo is a time-tested, successful way to write a novel (or work on a current WIP).
Speaking of WIPs (smooth segue, I know), I am going to give a quick report regarding how NaNoWriMo went for me this year. I’ve done NaNo once before in 2019 and barely managed to hit 50k. After taking a hiatus during 2020, I returned with new determination to write what would equate to a novel this November. Unlike many Wrimos, I did not start a new novel and continued with my current WIP.
This year, I had three goals for NaNoWriMo. First, I would write 1,667 words daily; second, I would have written 50k words by November 30th; and lastly, I would finish my novel at 150k words.
I am happy to report that I successfully achieved two of those; I wrote 1,667 words every single day in November and finished the month with 53,718 words!
Seventeen days into NaNo, I knew that my third goal was in trouble. I’d already hit my running goal of a 150k novel, but I was only a fifth of the way through the finale. Needless to say, I epically failed the last goal. As I’m writing this post, I am about 20k words away from having my first draft done. I realize I’ve created a monster of a novel… My new goal is to have it completed by December 19th just before my husband’s birthday and the holidays.
But I am happy with where things ended up with NaNoWriMo. I won’t lie, there were really hard days this November. There were days I would stare at the blank page and be overwhelmed with anxiety at the prospect of having to fill it with new words, or days where each word I wrote felt like trying to chip away at a concrete wall with a spoon. That being said, the joy at hitting my daily word count goal and the times where words would just flow onto the page were more than worth the difficult hours. I love that feeling when I get about a thousand words in and something clicks, sentences come easier, paragraphs form, and the page fills with intelligible prose.
NaNoWriMo pushed me to my current limits as the writer I am today. I also learned a lot about the kind of writer I am. For years, I thought I had to have every scene plotted out, every step planned so I wouldn’t have to do that work later. As I did NaNo this November, I discovered that my best writing happened in moments I hadn’t thought out or times when I made a change and had to run with a new scene. There were many ‘aha’ moments as characters would come up with solutions to problems I didn’t know existed.
I could go on for a while, but this post is already twice as long as I meant it to be.
The Writer’s Toolbox was a fun series to run this year. I think I’ll give it a break next year in lieu of WIP updates and sharing nuggets of knowledge from conferences and classes. My next post will be an end of year update on my novel, and in January, I’ll let you know what my new writing goals for the year are.
Stop by next month to see where I am on my author journey!